I recently bought a book that is one of only one-thousand copies published by an obscure little basement press in 1947 and is now out of print. The text comprises of an essay delivered to the students of Dartmouth College in early 1947 by Anais Nin. It is one of the gem’s of my book collection now. I’d like to share it with anyone who is interested:
On Writing by Anais Nin
There has been an attempt to categorize my work as a mere depiction of neurosis, and therefore as dealing with an exceptional rather than a general theme.
But on the contrary, I not only believe that we are suffering from a collective neurosis, but that this is precisely one of the most urgent themes for the novel today: the struggle between the forces of nature in us and our repressive and consequently destructive treatment of these forces.
This struggle has, for the moment at least, resulted in neurosis, which is simply a form of protest against an unnatural life.
That is why I want to speak about writing not in formal terms, but mainly of naturalness in writing, because in the presence of a collective neurosis it is all the more essential for the novelist not to share with the neurotic this paralyzing fear of nature which has been the cause of so much sterility in life and in the writing of today.
I chose to write about neurotic women because woman being closer to nature has made a more vehement protest against repressions.
Man has faced boldly the forces of nature outside of himself, has investigated them, mastered and harnessed many of them. But this conquest deprived him at the same time of his primitive, intimate contact with nature, resulting in a partial loss of his power and vitality.
Woman has retained her communication with nature (even in its negative form of destruction) and could have remained the symbol of nature for man, because her language and her means of perception are more unconscious and non-rational. But she has failed to fulfill that role, partly because of her tendency to imitate man and adopt his goals, and partly because of man’s fear of complete contact with the nature of woman.
Perhaps this fear in man arose from his being not quite so certain that the forces of nature manifested through woman could be as easily mastered or harnessed!
This has led to the absence, or failure of relationship between men and women so prevalent today, and it is a dramatic proof of the absence of relationship between man and nature.
While we refuse to organize the confusions within us we will never have an objective understanding of what is happening outside.
We will not be able to relate to it, to choose sides, to evaluate historically, and consequently we will be incapacitated for action.
Today a novelist’s preoccupation with inner psychological distortions does not stem from a morbid love of illness but from a knowledge that this is the theme of our new reality.
Like the modern physicist the novelist of today should face the fact that this new psychological reality can be explored and dealt with only under conditions of tremendously high atmospheric pressures, temperatures and speed, as well as in terms of new time-space, dimensitions for which the old containers represented by the traditional forms and conventions of the novel are completely inadequate and inappropriate.
That is why James Joyce shattered the old form of the novel and let his writing erupt in a veritable flow of associations.
Most novels today are inadequate because they reflect not our experience, but people’s fear of experience. They portray all the evasions.
I believe that the experience of war might have been less disastrous to the mental and emotional life of young Americans if they had been prepared by an honest literature for all the deep primitive experience with birth, sex and death.
In order to take action full maturity in experience is required. Novels which contribute to our emotional atrophy only deepen our blindness.
And nothing that we do not discover emotionally will have the power to alter our vision.
The constant evasion of emotional experience has created an immaturity which turns all experience into traumatic shocks from which the human being derives no strength or development, but neurosis.
Frederick Hoffman writing about D.H. Lawerence says: “Lawrence sensed a definite danger that the novel might deaden the senses and simply present dead matter persisting in a dead world. But if it is handled as a live portrait it is at once the artist’s most fluid medium and his best opportunity to convey to the world the meaning of the world, ‘the changing rainbow of our living relationships.’ How can creative art accomplish this? Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh — not the ordinary moment of an ordinary day but the critical moment of human relationships. How to capture this oscillation within this prison of cold print, without destroying that moment?”
It was while writing a Diary that I discovered how to capture the living moments.
Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements to the vitality of writing.
When I speak of the relationship between my diary and writing I do not intend to generalize as to the value of keeping a diary, or to advise anyone to so so, but merely to extract from this habit certain discoveries which can be easily transposed to other kinds of writing.
Of these the most important is naturalness and spontaneity. These elements sprung, I observed, from my freedom of selection: in the Diary I only wrote of what interested me genuinely, what I felt most strongly at the moment, and I found that this fervor, this enthusiasm produced a vividness which often withered in the formal work. Improvisation, free association, obedience to mood, impulse, brought forth countless images, portraits, descriptions, impressionistic sketches, symphonic experiments, from which I could dip at any time for material.
The Diary dealing always with the immediate present, the warm, the near, being written at white heat, developed a love of the living moment, of the immediate emotional reaction to experience, which revealed the power of recreation to lie in the sensibilities rather than in memory or critical intellectual perception.
The Diary, creating a vast tapestry, a web, exposing constantly the relation between the past and present, weaving meticulously the invisible interaction, noting the repetitions of themes, developed the sense of the totality of personality, this tale without beginning or end which encloses all things, and relates all things, as a strong antidote to the unrelatedness, incoherence and disintegration of the modern man. I could follow the inevitable pattern and obtain a large, panoramic view of character.
This personal relationship to all things, which is condemned as subjective, limiting. I found to be the core of individuality, personality, and originality. The idea that subjectivity is an impasse is as false as the idea that objectivity leads to a larger form of life.
A deep personal relationship reaches far beyond the personal into the general. Again it is a matter of depths.
The Diary also taught me that it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. I learned to chose the heightened moments because they are the moments of revelation. It is the moment when the real self rises to the surface, shatters, erupts and assumes reality and identity. The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.
By this emphasis on the fiery moments, the explosions, I reached the reality of feeling and the senses.
The split from reality, fragmentation, the dismemberment of modern man has been the theme of modern literature beginning with the Proust’s microscopic analysis, through the dissolutions of Joyce’s undifferentiated flow of associations, but neither of these processes needed to prove fatal. The discovery of the collective richness flowing underground below our consciousness need not have led to a loss of the total self. But what remains to be done is a new synthesis to include the new dimensions discovered.
The new dimension in character and reality requires a fusion of two extremes which have been handled separately, on the one side by the poets, and on the other by the so called realists.
I am not saying that I have done it.
I actually think it will be accomplished by the younger unpublished writers I have been reading.
The Diary writing also taught me that to achieve perfection in writing while retaining naturalness it was important to write a great deal, to write fluently, as the pianist practices the piano, rather than to correct constantly one page until it whithers. To write continuously, to try over and over again to capture a certain mood, a certain experience. Intensive correcting may lead to monotony, to working on dead matter, whereas continuing to write and to write until perfection is achieved through repetition is a way to elude this monotony, to avoid performing an autopsy. Sheer playing of scales, practise, repetition — then by the time one is ready to write a story or a novel a great deal of natural distillation and softing has been accomplished.
There is another great danger for the writer, perhaps the greatest one of all: his consciousness of the multiple taboos society has imposed on literature, and his inner censor. In the Diary I found a devious (a woman’s) way to evade this outer and inner censor. It is surprising how well one writes if one things no one will read you.
This honesty, this absence of posturing, is a most fecund source of material. The writer’s task is to overthrow the taboos rather than accept them.
With all my insistence on the overthrow of outworn taboos, I nevertheless respected the power of art.
Naked truth is unbearable to most, and art is our most effective means of overcoming human resistance to truth. The writer has the same role as the surgeon and his handling of anaesthesia is as important as his skill with the knife.
Human beings, in their resistance to truth, erect fortresses and some of these fortresses can only be demolished by the dynamic power of the symbol, which reaches the emotions directly.
D. H. Lawerence says: “Symbols don’t MEAN something, they ARE units of human experience. A complex of emotional experience IS a symbol. And the power of the symbol is to arouse the deep, emotional, dynamic, primitive self.”
The fact that man persists in dreaming in terms of symbols shows how he clings to this primitive emotional perception.
It is even more interesting to talk about what has not yet been done.
For instance, I believe a rich fund of symbolism lies in science. the old romantic symbols no longer correspond to our reality.
Modern science is giving birth to symbols which parallel the new psychological realities, and could make their tenuous patterns more concrete.
I can’t do it because I know too little about science!
My studies led me rather towards language and art.
Having come to America as a foreigner and not knowing English I caught a new perspective of the language.
But whatever marvellous word I unearthed from the dictionary with the enthusiasm of an explorer was always condemned to disuse by my English teacher as obsolete or affected. When I asked: who proclaimed them so? she could not answer me. It was this prim evasiveness which led me to suspect that much of this mysterious censorship of expansiveness in language had been caused by puritanism: a puritanical disapprobation of richness, a puritanical fear of color, a puritanical shame of the senses and suspicion of charm.
Coming from Spain it struck me that we had forgotten in America how masterfully the ancients used charms to encourage salvation.
Whoever has smelled incense in a church will admit that religion made a wise use of ole-factory enchantments.
Are we going to discard all these forms of communication and persuasion because they were sometimes mishandled?
Whoever has read the Arabian nights knows how much art has to do here with enlivening the energies!
Art is our relations to the senses.
The great potency of ancient tales, legends, ballads, lay in their power to prepare the senses for the magic effect of the tale.
This sounds as if I were recommending hypnotism. If the sound of Joyce’s voice reading the chanting quality of his rhythms is hypnotic then I say better be hypnotized than to die in the deserts of bare and barren writing.
The inciting to naturalness immediately brings up the problem of form.
By following rigorously and exclusively the patterns made by the emotions I found that in the human unconscious itself there is an indigenous structure and if we are able to detect and grasp it we have the plot, the form and style of the novel of the future.
In this apparently chaotic world of the unconscious there is an inevitability as logical, as coherent, as final as any to be found in classical drama.
In this new dimension of character the form is created by the meaning, it is born of the theme. It is created very much as the earth itself is created, by a series of inner convulsions and eruptions, dictated by inner geological tensions.
It is an organic development.
For instance, when I began the portrait of Stella I had no premeditated plan, but the character of Stella being a summation of the feminine spirit — labryinthean, elusive, and mobile, this gave to the writing itself its contours, its rhythms. The writing was determined by the form of her nature, it reflected the tonalities of her voice. I instinctively chose light weight words to match the volatility of her gestures, words of the same substance as her moods and mannerisms.
I would like to give now an example of how creative the unconscious can be if one allows it to work spontaneously.
In Ladders to Fire I had written the section called This Hunger up to the description of an impasse in the realtionship between Jay and Lillian: because she has to mother the child in him, she cannot have a real child. She surrenders the human child and accepts the role.
And there I stopped for a few days.
One mornign I awakened to remember a concert I had heard in Paris years ago. The memory came up with great vividness and persistance. I was a little annoyed for it had no apparent connection with what I was writing and I looked on it as an irrelevent interruption.
But it confronted me with the clarity and precision of a painting and to rid myself of its hauntingness I decided to write it down. The concert itself was notthe strange sight I had caught as I looked out through a big bay window into a garden: three large mirrors had been placed in the center of the garden. The incongruity of mirrors in a garden was striking, but such a scene only stirs a deep response when it touches off some primitive recognition of a symbolical drama.
As I wrote on, about the woman pianist, about the real garden, and its reflection in the mirror I still wondered why the impression had been deep enough to last for years, and why it should have come to the surface of my memory at this particular moment. It was only when I was finished writing that I realized I had continued the story of This Hunger and completed it by giving the key to the book: the woman pianist playing with such intensity was trying to divert a natural instinct (the need of a human child) into music.
But the transmutation was not being made.
The real garden represented nature, relaxed, fulfilled. The mirrors — neurosis, reflections, artifice.
The mirrors in the garden were the perfect symbol of unreality and refraction, a miniature reproduction of the drama I had been portraying of a conflict between nature and neurosis.
